The 29th Annual Conference of the IAFA took place in WIT on the 19th and 20th May, hosted by the School of Business with a number of guest speakers

The 29th Annual Conference of the Irish Accounting and Finance Association (IAFA) took place in Waterford Institute of Technology on the 19th and 20th May 2016. Hosted by the School of Business, and kindly sponsored by Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) the conference saw over 120 leading national and international academics partake in this annual conference of research, scholarship and education in accounting and finance. The conference also afforded an opportunity to show-case Waterford as a city of rich history, culture and education.

The two day event was formally opened by Dr Tom O’Toole, Head of the School of Business at WIT who spoke eloquently about Waterford – its history, its environs and its business milieu as well as of WITs vibrant School of Business, a place of ‘student learning nexus with a rich portfolio of programmes, emergent and skillful research teams and individuals respected by their peers’.

The two day event featured a series of over 40 research papers presented to delegates. The broad themes of the presentations were Financial Reporting, Auditing, Corporate Governance, Accounting Education, Management Accounting, Taxation, Finance and Accounting History.

The Keynote note speaker of the conference was Professor Noel O'Sullivan of Loughborough University in the UK who is the foremost authority on Corporate Governance in the UK and Ireland. Professor O'Sullivan addressed delegates on the topic of the effectiveness of Non-Executive Directors on Boards.

One of the highlights of the conference was the gala dinner held in the Tower Hotel on the evening of 19th May where conference delegates, WIT staff and local business stakeholders dined together in an evening of splendour social conviviality.

The conference was preceded by the IAFA annual Doctoral Colloquium on Wednesday 18th also in Waterford Institute of Technology and kindly sponsored by Certified Public Accountants. This annual event provides students, at all stages of doctoral research, with an opportunity to present their work and receive feedback from academics in their field. This was the largest Doctoral Colloquium to date and was facilitated by Professor Joan Ballantine, University of Ulster and Dr Sean Byrne, WIT. Guest speaker Professor Jill Atkins, Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at Henley Business School, addressed doctoral delegates on the ‘Qualitative and Interpretive research methods and methodology in Accounting and Financial Management’. Later that evening conference delegates attended a reception by Waterford City Mayor John Cummins who said that the Three Sisters project offered an opportunity to celebrate the benefits of education across Waterford Wexford and Kilkenny. He invited the attendees from overseas and from home to share in the south east experience of life and the natural and built environment, in warm friendship and hospitality.

The Irish Accounting and Finance Association (IAFA) was founded 40 years ago to provide a network for accounting and finance academics to share and disseminate knowledge through conferences, seminars, symposia, and through its journal, Accounting, Finance and Governance Review. It provides a network for academics in these domains, maintaining deep and valued relationships with professional accounting bodies such as CIMA and CPA , and through international interactions with similar academic bodies, with research networks and with individual researchers within and beyond Ireland.